Posted
by
BeauHDon Monday May 02, 2016 @07:18PM
from the hanky-panky dept.

An anonymous reader writes: According to CBC.ca, "At least one expert is anticipating that, as the so-called 'smart' cars get smarter, there will eventually be an increase in an unusual form of distracted driving: hanky-panky behind the wheel." Barrie Kirk of the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence said, "I am predicting that, once computers are doing the driving, there will be a lot more sex in cars. That's one of several things people will do which will inhibit their ability to respond quickly when the computer says to the human, 'Take over.'" Federal officials, who have been tasked with building a regulatory framework to govern driverless cars, highlighted their concerns in briefing notes compiled for Transport Minister Marc Garneau. "Drivers tend to overestimate the performance of automation and will naturally turn their focus away from the road when they turn on their auto-pilot," said the note. The Tesla autopilot feature has been receiving the most criticism as there have been many videos posted online showing Tesla drivers engaged in questionable practices, including reading a newspaper or brushing their teeth.

What's the issue here? Shit if the car is driving you to your destination then what you do inside the car is your own business. Besides we all worry about people becoming too absorbed in games/VR and other tech that we'd face population decline. This way the nerds can reproduce.

"Female subject was hospitalized after suffering a 70MPH front impact while having sex."

Seriously, people are dumb enough to not only let the car drive while they are having rabbit sex in the driver's seat, they are likely to do it even when the weather conditions are highly inclement, such as when roads are icy, or there are other hazards that would render any autonomous system dangerous.

I trust an autonomous car to perform evasive maneuvers to avoid accidents or mitigate their damage much more than I trust the general population. I trust a wealthy fuck in an autonomous car more than a trust someone putting on makeup or texting in a regular car.

Inclement weather is not accident avoidance. Especially ice. That is "Oh shit, I lost traction control on three of my tires!"

It is accident avoidance, because if there was no chance of an accident, then losing traction wouldn't have any negative consequences.

Cars already have anti-lock brakes, because a simple machine is already better at preventing you from losing traction that you are. This is precisely the sort of thing that I expect autonomous cars to excel at.

The autonomous system cannot determine if the road 100 meters ahead is covered in a thin sheen of black ice or not.

Why not?

People ARE dumb enough to be fucking behind the wheel while the autonomous system tries to navigate iced up roads.

What the fuck is a human supposed to add to the equation? bad judgement?

The best an autonomous system can do is aggregate road data from other autonomous cars nearby to attempt to determine if there is ice ahead. -- a fat load of good that does if your autonomous vehicle is the one that skids out on it first, or if your vehicle is not receiving such telemetry for whatever reason.

Yeah autonomous cars can do that. And I don't see how being the first human driver to skid out of control is any better.

I trust the idiot fucking behind the wheel of an autonomous vehicle about as much as I trust a politician not to lie. That is to say, not at all.

And like a lying politician, you don't have any better alternatives. Do you really want the guy with the bad judgement in charge of the death machine? The less control humans have the better.

Automation makes the driving experience more predictable by removing human error. This is both good and bad. It leads to conditions where the vehicle will make predictably bad choices, but the occupant will believe otherwise.

If they are making predictable errors, then that makes it all that much easier to fix the errors.

The biggest error is people going out in conditions that they shouldn't be on the roads in the first place. See it all the time here in Baltimore - people who call out of work but can drive to the mall because they want to. It's one thing if you are going to work (and you should probably call out if you can in some of these storms), or have to work in it (EMS, hospital staff, road crews, automotive mechanics, etc), and another to be that guy that just wanted to go to the bar. People are stupid, plain and

(why cant autonomous systems detect ice 100 meters ahead?)
IR cameras detect if the road is reflective or absorptive of IR spectra. Water in general is IR absorptive. IR cameras cannot tell the difference between a wet surface and an icy one. Likewise, it cannot tell ice from snow, or slush, even if it has a thermometer to tell it that it is below the freezing point outside. (which would itself be prone to anomalous temperature readings from wind chill, or from engine heat.)

It's photons. Surely the human eye is not magic.

The issue with antilock brakes you mention is only partially correct. Most drivers do not know how to properly brake on ice. For drivers that do, they consistently perform better without antilock brakes.

If humans can do a good job of maintaining traction on ice, then we just need to transfer whatever it is we are doing right into an algorithm, so a machine can do the same thing, but with many of orders of magnitude higher precision.

Most drivers are just bad drivers. So, the antilock brakes save lives overall. That does not mean human drivers that know how to actually drive on inclement surfaces are inferior.

The same logic can be applied to autonomous cars.

For starters, they can instruct the vehicle to drive with more caution-- avoiding going 75mph on the icy highway, for instance.

I don;t really trust people to make this decision. I would fully expect idot drivers to tell their cars to go the maximum speed allowable at all times. For that reason I would rather the car decide when conditions are potentially unsafe (i.e. cold, wet, foggy, etc).

Distracted occupants (and I dare say, a person fucking in the car is going to be quite distracted, or else the sex will have to be really bad.) are not going to be so mindful, until the vehicle mistakes an icy road for a wet one, loses traction and either puts them into the center wall, flips them over, or puts them in a ditch.

On the contrary, I'd say that an autonomous vehicle that realizes it's cold and wet and drives more cautiously as a result, might very well drive better than this same douchebag getting a BJ driving down an icy road.

Human pattern recognition may as well be magic as far as current "A.I." is going. One situation at a time is going into what is effectively a big collection of lookup tables but it's going to take a while.

There's like a zillion layers of processing behind the eye that a robot can't match. There's also reasoning behind the eye that a robot can't match. Why do you think captchas are a thing? Pattern recognition is pretty much something animals do better than any robot, so far.

In principle? Sure. But we're talking about in practice, currently or in the near future. The fact is, no one has a car that can drive for shit in weather, and mostly they just re

Yes the human eye is not magic. Whatever photons we can detect, we can make machines that can detect those photons and more. The fact that we choose to use a limited subset of sensors in some applications, is simply a reflection of our confidence in our ability to get by with less. If we need more/better sensor data, we will put more/better sensors in our stuff.

What the human can do, is realize there is icy conditions when it steps outside on the way to the car.

I would definitely place any trust in each individual human driver to determine whether conditions are too icy or not.

The car lacks this wide array of additional information the human has access to.

The autonomous system cannot determine if the road 100 meters ahead is covered in a thin sheen of black ice or not.

Yes it can. Tesla cars transmit data back to a server, which can then inform other cars in the area. I don't know if it transmits traction data, but it certainly could.

Also, black ice tends to form in the same stretch of road when the conditions are similar. So an automated car could reference historical accident data for the road it is on, and slow down before reaching hazardous spots.

The best an autonomous system can do is aggregate road data from other autonomous cars nearby to attempt to determine if there is ice ahead.

The last few cars I have owned have all had a little icon and warning beep that appear when a simply temperature sensor notices that it is cold enough for ice on the road. The car's manual usually recommends you slow down when that happens.

It's hilarious to me that people cite "ice" as an example of their precious human drivers being superior to machines,

Indeed. When a big snowstorm was predicted, Tesla sent out an email to inform owners that they should use Autopilot during the storm, because it would handle the hazardous conditions better than most human drivers.

> It's hilarious to me that people cite "ice" as an example of their precious human drivers being superior to machines

Not sure if trolling or serious, but the ability of a human to drive well in rough weather is, currently, absolute and true.

It is true that antilock brakes can automate a function that allows novice drivers to stop as well as good drivers, and that's an excellent innovation. It is also true that, at some point in time, computers will do everything better than humans. But, that time is n

In snowy weather, roads can lose a whole lane. Four lane roads become two lane roads become three lane roads. Watching a car subtlety veer as it runs over an ice patch, and knowing how to handle that (avoid the spot, coast over in neutral, whatever) is something that a good driver will do instantly, and a computer can't yet handle- nor does anyone seem to be working on that issue.

How is that anything more complicated than merely providing additional training data? I'm assuming that all self-driving cars wi

I imagine some wealthy fuck and his floozy fucking on the way to a hotel for "business trip" on an iced up road, colliding with the center partition doing 75mph, with all the trimmings.

Because automated cars driving 75 MPH on ice will be a thing. And drivers who are alert, rather than fucking their floozy are going to be relevant. If you're going to automate driving to the point that the human sitting behind the wheel isn't actually doing anything except in rare situations, then I don't see the point of having the human in the loop.

Like I pointed out-- IR cameras detect the radio opacity of the surface they are trained on. Ice and liquid water both absorb IR light. The camera will not be enough to tell the car that there is ice, instead of water.

Granted, for safety, a wet surface should not be driven faster than, IIRC, 35mph due to hydroplaning. The reality is that occupants will complain mightily about their autonomous vehicle driving that slow because it sprinkled a little, and the car is unlikely to observe such a restraint as a

What happens when there is a car in front of you? How is an IR camera going to see ice through a car and prepare to drive accordingly? A human can anticipate when there will be ice just by looking at the surrounding ground but an IR camera actually has to see it.

Like I pointed out-- IR cameras detect the radio opacity of the surface they are trained on. Ice and liquid water both absorb IR light. The camera will not be enough to tell the car that there is ice, instead of water.

Even if we were to assume your claim is true, and it is not, you still have the matter of the human eye not being any better at the task.

Granted, for safety, a wet surface should not be driven faster than, IIRC, 35mph due to hydroplaning. The reality is that occupants will complain mightily about their autonomous vehicle driving that slow because it sprinkled a little, and the car is unlikely to observe such a restraint as a consequence.

Because exposing the manufacture to huge liability is better than customer complaints? Not feeling it.

Without other data telling it that the opaque road surface is from ice instead of rain, or slush, the vehicle will think the road is wet, not icy. Being alert when the car is barreling down the road unaware of the hazard, and telling the car "hey, slow down, there is ice!" is a good safety check for the autonomous system. it doesnt mean you have to drive for it, it just makes the drive safer because the car has another system (the occupant) to help it make driving decisions.

The occupant still has to be relevant in order for this to matter. You still have yet to explain how an observant human (who let us note, wouldn't really be that observant due to the lack of engagement and the lack of useful sensory apparatus) is going to be any improvemen

Sex! Sex is the problem. Fornication without the godly intent of reproduction to strengthen the army of his lord and savior is a vile abomination and the most gravely mortal of mortal sins. Right up there to self abuse while watching pornographic materials on the internet, which we all know is just a tool for Satan

That’s the only downside I came up with. Once most cars are autonomous, you might be able to have a seatbelt-free mode where the car moves slower and avoids sudden acceleration or deceleration. Then people will see a slow-moving bumping car and nudge and wink.

The only negative I can see is that you'd want to remain buckled in, even with a self-driving car. So it wouldn't be very safe, but you know......

Hard to believe, but it's already happening *now*. Yes, people are driving and having sex at the same time (massively distracted driving). And yes, it includes those who are going solo, as well as couples.

The main reason we're even contemplating self driving cars is because you can bet at least 90% of the driving public (in North America at least) doesn't give a d

Who says they aren't attempting to reproduce? You don't know that! They could be a married couple attempting to fulfill their duty!

Also, religious fail. Fornication is not one of the worst sins, much less a deadly sin. Feel free to try and find a reference otherwise, because the Church has never classified it as such. There are some right wing heretics in the States that might agree with you, but like I said, there is no reference in Church dogma nor the Bible itself (which most of those heretics screa

Sex! Sex is the problem. Fornication without the godly intent of reproduction to strengthen the army of his lord and savior is a vile abomination and the most gravely mortal of mortal sins. Right up there to self abuse while watching pornographic materials on the internet, which we all know is just a tool for Satan

Some people have the idea that self-driving cars should not be totally self-driving, but occupy some nebulous intermediary region. This, of course, completely invalidates the point of having self-driving cars, but these people are more fearful of robots of unknown incompetence than they are of human drivers of proven incompetence.

I remember having sex in my car "while" driving when I was young. Not to mention all the blow jobs I received. I think it'd be a lot safer with a self driving car. I just did manage to stay on the road but I was all over it.

The problem is that a lot of companies (and, at their behest, some of the regulators too) are going for a slow takeover of driving by computers. Today they can do a little bit of driving mostly on the highway. Next year, they'll handle some city driving too. The year after that, they'll handle areas without good lane markings, the next year get a little better still, etc. But they still need a person there, because what if the car encounters a woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck around an interse [siliconbeat.com]

When a car stops in the middle of a difficult situation because the AI is confused they will make that situation even worse... humans need to take over quickly and keep traffic moving if possible.

As long as most traffic is still human driving is an exercise in risk mitigation, not a problem with clear stop/go decisions.

That's like a pilot stopping and deciding to defer to the passengers on the plane. If the AI isn't up to the task then it's not a self-driving car. Almost all dangerous situations are high speed situation. Even with human drivers switching drivers at high speed is a hard thing to do. The best thing to do is stop and then switch drivers and once you're stopped the difference between a 10 second switch, a 60 second switch, or even a 10 minute switch is minimal.

When a car stops in the middle of a difficult situation because the AI is confused they will make that situation even worse... humans need to take over quickly and keep traffic moving if possible.

If I have to sit in a self-driving car fully alert of the surrounding traffic and always poised to take over from the computer then exactly how is this any better than normal car? I might as well save the money and drive myself.

If I have to sit in a self-driving car fully alert of the surrounding traffic and always poised to take over from the computer then exactly how is this any better than normal car?

It isn't better, it is worse, because for example the scenario in the headline of TFA, and less spectacular lapses of concentration. It is also worse because if you must maintain as much alertness as if you were driving yourself, but are not, it is going to be very mentally stressful and even harrowing (as I find when I am passenger to any driver with a different style from mine). It seems to me that the only thing it would save is some lightweight arm movements and slight foot movements - but what is so

Tesla cars aren't really self-driving - but they're misleadingly marketed as such. My (cheaper) car has smart cruise control (with collision avoidance) and lane keeping, so on the highway it's safe to take my hands of the wheel or be distracted - for a second or two. I'd never confuse it with self-driving, though apparently and idiot or two has. Tesla's system is a bit better, so more idiots confuse it with self-driving, abetted by the was Tesla markets the feature.

It's definitely self driving if you can put your tesla in autopilot, go to sleep and wake up the next morning hundreds of miles away from where you started. It may not be safe. But it's hard to argue that this happened purely by luck.

My (cheaper) car has smart cruise control (with collision avoidance) and lane keeping, so on the highway it's safe to take my hands of the wheel or be distracted - for a second or two.

Here's a question to get back to my point - What are the respective failure modes?

You mention that your car has collision avoidance. Have you looked into how smart that is? Is there ever a point at which it'll basically shit it's pants, tell you 'you drive', and disable itself completely? Or would it continue to do it's best to avoid hitting something until it comes to a stop because something is wrong?

Remember, I consider an 'autopilot' prone to unsafe deactivations to be unsafe and unready for the publ

You haven't really learned python until you've implemented Conway's game-of-life with no if statements or forks in the code at all.

Yes. It can be done. There are several ways actually. The easiest one is to build each condition handler as a function, and set up a dictionary with the test values as keys and the functions as values. Then it's a simple case of: some_dict[test_value]()

Not only will it be couples and singles wailing away, there will be an increase in mobile prostitution. I say increase in that the last time I was in Vegas I was given "promotional" literature advertising that I could get a happy ending limo back to the airport.

While this is sort of a funny thing it is not inconsequential in that most of the time prostitution takes place in an alley or some dark spot near the stroll. I once worked in an office in the shadier part of town and we joked that we had a rubber tree out back as the discards were often thrown into its branches.

Now they won't have to pull into some dark corner but just circle the block for a short while.

Just a few of the zillion cultural and economic changes that self driving cars will impart.

last time I was in Vegas I was given "promotional" literature advertising that I could get a happy ending limo back to the airport
Since that's a very short ride, I imagine they'll be driving round and round the block. Just another way to inflate the charges, really.

My, erm, charges had better wind up inflated, since who knows what the hooker limo's going run me.

To be fair, that's a relatively minor one compared to the changes that CARS made. The Model-T offered relative privacy and comfort outside the house to the masses for the first time in human history - and a VERY large portion of the next generation were conceived on it's back seats.

Of course they refer to sex, that always gets the attention. It is just one of many activities people may engage in as passenger of their own car, after all, the moment a car is truly self-driving there is no such thing as a "driver" any more. Everyone in the car is a passenger, and can not be counted upon to pay attention to the road - not even to have a driving license and the ability to do anything useful.

A self-driving car should NEVER try to hand back control to a human driver, without the human initia

If a "self-driving" car still requires a driver to be available at the drop of a hat, what's the point of the "self-driving" aspect? So I get to pay extra for the computer, the software, the sensors, but I still have to be ready and able to take over if the system cannot cope? What's the up-side for me?

Let's face it, humans pretty much suck at multitasking, especially when one of the activities is difficult -- like watching the road closely, at the level required to drive, but without actually doing the driving. Nobody except the most trained are going to be able to sustain this, even if they want to, and most won't want to in the first place. Any system that allows inattention to road conditions will inevitably lead to inattention to road conditions. The only proper response of a self-driving car to cond

We've got 'Centers of Excellence' all over the place in my little corner of the Military Industrial Complex. Sometimes I think America's number one export is our bullshit. But at the same time I'm not sure whether to hang my head in shame for us or in embarrassment for the rest of the world that seems to eager to buy what we're selling.

It seems they use sex to sell everything, so why not use it to sell autonomous cars? We barely have enough free time anymore to have sex in the usual places.
And if horny people provide greater incentives to make car guidance and accident prevention more reliable who am I to complain?

First, the average number of car passengers (or should I say inhabitants, as in the US people tend to live in their cars) is approx 1.3. This includes parents with children. Therefore, most cars are used by only one single adult which would imply that these people had to masturbate to meet the experts assumption. Second, what is it with you US citizens? Why do you need to have sex in uncomfortable places? Go to the beach, public park or your flipping room. Cars are so uncomfortable (exceptions are campers a

There are a lot of assumptions baked into that rather flippant remark. I actually know some women, and most of them actually like sex. Some even enjoy it in cars, though now we're (long) out of our teens, it's not terribly appealing.

If the only way you can imagine having sex is by pressuring a woman into doing something she doesn't want to do, that says much more about you than it does about women. I feel sorry for you.

And that is your prerogative to do so, just as plenty of other women choose to engage in sexual activity (and some even against the man's will). I have met women that will refuse to date a man if sex isn't part of the deal.

Add all those up, assuming none of them decide self driving would actually meet their needs more, and you still have driving being a niche skill acquired by the tiny proportion of people who still have a need/interest in it. Much like horse-riding is now.